Catie Edmondson

speaker

234 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 17 Oct

Catie Edmondson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

Appearances

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The Daily · Republicans Take Control of Congress — and Harris Certifies Her Own Loss · 7 Jan 2025 podcast

I mean, it's going to be really tough. Now, we have a blueprint of what they hope their major legislative accomplishment is going to be.

So Republicans right now are talking about shoehorning in a number of their priorities, raising the debt limit, enacting deep spending cuts, extending the Trump tax cuts from 2017, as well as cracking down on immigration, implementing these new border security policies.

And they want to put it all into one bill that they're going to try to fast track through Congress using this process called budget reconciliation, which allows the Senate to pass a measure like this using just a simple majority vote.

That's right. And the point of that is that it's a much lower threshold of support needed to pass this than what is usually required in the Senate. Now, the problem with this is that by jamming all of this legislation into one bill, maybe even jamming it into two bills, as some have suggested, is that this essentially becomes sort of a seesaw from hell.

Well, you have lawmakers who want to include very expensive immigration measures, who want to extend the Trump tax cuts, which are estimated to cost about $4 trillion. And at the same time, they want to make sure this bill doesn't cost money or add to the nation's debt.

And so that means in order to offset the costs of all of those other policies, you're going to have to enact some really deep spending cuts. Now, there are certainly a number of lawmakers who would be happy to shutter entire agencies. These are the Republicans in the House that we've mostly been talking about today.

But at the same time, both in the House and the Senate, you have more centrist Republicans, particularly Republicans who represent purplish districts, states who just got out of tough reelections, who certainly don't want to be seen as politicians. Laying waste to the federal government, shuttering programs that their constituents rely on.

And so this becomes a tremendously difficult balancing act to figure out how do you implement all these policies that are going to cost a lot of money while cutting a bunch of programs, each of which have their own constituencies on the Hill. And House Republican leaders have decided to add an extra layer of difficulty here by

They've said they want to make sure this legislation at least passes the House within the first 100 days of Trump's presidency.

And that is a Herculean lift that we're now talking about.

With a one-vote majority in the House, yes.

Well, I remember in the days after January 6th talking to Republican members of Congress who themselves were sheltering in place at the Capitol on January 6th, who heard stories from their staff about their staff barricading themselves into their office to protect themselves from the rioters who were rampaging through the Capitol. And I remember a lot of them saying,

being appalled by what happened, who were making the case that Donald Trump was not someone who should lead the Republican Party, and that, in fact, in order to move on from January 6th, in order to move on from what had happened, that Republicans needed to walk away from him as a leader. Now, fast forward four years later, Voters have spoken.

They reelected Trump to the White House for a second term. They elected a Republican Congress, giving Republicans a majority in both the House and the Senate. And you have a Republican Party that is pretty unified around Trump himself.

And so it's a remarkable turnabout, and it's not lost on me at all that the question now is not should they unify around Trump, but rather how unified can they be and how successful they will be at making his agenda come to fruition.

Thanks, Michael.

The Daily · Ring-Kissing, Lawsuits and a Looming Shutdown · 20 Dec 2024 podcast

So Donald Trump is now officially against passing the funding bill that would avoid a government shutdown four days before Christmas.

I can pick it up because I've been through many of these spending fights now, and the last few of them have been fairly anticlimactic. They've made it through the Senate to President Biden's desk really without much drama. And I think we generally had an idea that that was going to happen again this time. Mm-hmm. And of course, that's not what happened.

Instead, when Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, unveiled the spending bill that he negotiated with Democrats, it included a litany of other measures, including $100 billion in disaster aid for the American Southeast. But it also had all of these other provisions that were added to it.

And so when this bill was unveiled, there was a wide swath of Republicans in the House who were furious with it. And then, of course, we had Elon Musk weigh in, and that really began sort of the final death rattle for this bill.

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